Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!

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Sarah and I have been reading Sandra Tsing Loh’s Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting!— sort of stealing it back and forth from one another. It’s actually laugh out loud funny (and it takes a lot to make this grumpy old man laugh OL as opposed to just doing a sort of Cheney lip-curl of mild amusement). Sandra Loh is an NPR commentator and comic/performance artist (she does one-woman-shows); the book is partly a memoir about how she became a public-school parental activist in L.A.  It’s really smart and biting about parenting and especially the insanities of parental competitiveness, gifted-children mania, and private school admissions craziness.

The “motherf%#$@” in the subtitle is less gratuitous than it may seem in that part of the plot of the memoir involves her getting fired from her gig at the L.A. NPR station for the inadvertent use of an obscenity, which ends up temporarily turning her into a cause celebre.  (Coincidentally, this happened to me too — I was suspended from my college radio station for one week in a crackdown when I read something from the back of a New Jersey punk band’s record cover that contained a curse. Unaccountably, though, I did not become a first amendment hero on campus for this brave act.)

One moment I love occurs when she is bitterly regretting the quasi-bohemian life she and her husband Mike have lived in L.A. with no attention paid to property values and school districts:

And look at this house we bought.  What were we thinking?  It seemed so charming, this thirteen-hundred-square-foot 1926 Spanish-style bungalow.  We were the sort of wide-eyed, barefoot, idealistic, Joni Mitchell-style bohemians who were so amazed we could buy a structure that we bought it without FIRST VETTING THE NEIGHBORHOOD.  Our method of buying a house?  Look at that sunshine!  Look at that cactus!  So pretty!  Pretty cactus!  Pretty, pretty cactus!  Idiots!… We paid little attention as to whether we were doing the smart thing — moving to a good school district, next to lawyers or bankers or periodontal surgeons.  Idiots, we would have insisted on NOT living next to such bourgeois sellouts!  Oh, how we laughed and partied on this sagging deck, with its Chinese paper lanterns and Miles Davis records and Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s.

Another hilarious recurring theme has to do with her dismayed realization that while certain friends’ children were preparing for private school exams with Baby Einstein and “kinderjazzbastics,” her own kids were engaged in random activities with no educational value:

I notice that there is quite a bit of pointless dancing around in underwear in this house, to wild keenings of jazz.  There is much fussy making of messy blanket nests in discarded cardboard boxes.  There is much random shampooing of bears.

Sarah and I keep chucking about the shampooing of bears.  So true!

In the end the book is also inspiring in its call for upper-middle-class parents to rethink their reflexive phobia of urban public schools. Here’s an interesting interview with Loh in Salon.com.

“We are the lost civilization”

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The notoriously apolitical David Letterman on a lengthy rant about global warming.  Paul Shaffer’s inane little noises of assent add a surreal touch.  Here’s a partial transcript:

Until we get the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, we are screwed.  We are walking dead people.  We are the lost civilization.  You’re looking at us right here.  Time to go, the cab is coming…. I’ll tell you why it’s too late.  We’ve had no leadership… nobody has stepped forward…. We have to find alternative forms of energy.  On the other hand, I don’t even know why I’m talking about this, because it’s TOO LATE.  We are DEAD MEAT.   The Republicans have taken climate change out of their platform.  As far as they’re concerned, everything’s fine.  “96 degrees in March, yeah, just how we like it!”  We are so screwed….

I adored Letterman in his early days in the 1980s.  I eventually cooled on him when the witty, sarcastic irony that had seemed so pointed started to seem to turn into a more predictable show-biz attitude.  I used to feel there was a real edge of absurdist critique there, but the “critique” part became harder to glimpse through all the celebrity interviews and so on.

Anyway, I like it when he surprises me.  I do still think he’s an intriguingly weird & smart guy who has never been 100% swallowed up by celebrity and television culture.

And a Hoosier, of course.  Wiki: “According to the Ball State Daily News, he originally had wanted to attend Indiana University, but his grades weren’t good enough, so he decided to attend Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.”  I wonder if anyone has ever used that fact to argue against IU’s raising/tightening admissions standards.

Thinking vs. imagining; Swordy

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On Sunday I took Celie and Iris to a special classical music concert for kids (a really neat event; peer pressure somehow led all the little kids to sit relatively quietly on the floor in front — very sweet).  I was explaining to them on the way there that the music (it was Ravel and Debussy) is intended to help you imagine things.  Iris said, “I’m always so busy thinking things that there isn’t any room for imagining.”  When I pressed further, she said, “well, maybe I can tell my body to push all the thoughts out so I can try to imagine.”  (The contradicts, btw, a recent comment she made that she’s always thinking of secret stories in her head.  Although maybe that’s what she means by thinking.)

Years ago a friend of ours commented that the following experience finally made her believe that gender is to some degree hard-wired: they gave their (2 year old?) daughter a toy train, which she lovingly swaddled and put to bed.  The girls did something yesterday that reminded me of that.  C&I were playing and having play-fights with this “sword” (a plastic extendable thingy that looks kind of like a light saber).  At one point we overheard Iris murmur, “I’m the mommy and I’m putting on my goodest fighting gloves.”  (These are gardening gloves Sarah bought them recently that they primarily use to play with Pot Luck.)  Later they put “Swordy” to bed for the night — put him in the cloth napkin drawer where they tucked him in like a baby.

(Let me add that I would never claim that this proves anything about biological gender — at this point, almost age five, C&I’s veins course with princess-y gender ideology that is way beyond our control.)

Canvassing for Obama

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The whole family went canvassing Saturday on a semi-rural stretch south of town.  Sarah had been assigned this cluster of 30 or so residences in this area and handed a google map with the addresses highlighted.  These were people whom the campaign had reason to suspect of being undecided or wavering or persuadable.  We parked the minivan in the Laminated Tops store parking lot (closed on Sat.) and hauled the girls on the wagon.  We’d brought along coloring books and markers, and had stopped at Kroeger’s on the way for a bag of Tootsie Roll pops to dole out to the girls for good behavior bribe the girls.

Our first pass was in a little mini… not sure what to call it, a tiny subdivision?  Basically just a big driveway off the main road with 5 or 6 multifamily apartments.  My guess is that these places might rent for $500-600 a month, I’m not really sure.  Not fancy at all, with a touch of trailer-park feeling, but in a way, nice; one good thing about living here, if you want to go this way, is that you can have this kind of rural existence with a forest off your back yard and still be a 10-15 drive to town.

Anyway, the first name on our list turned out to have a big POW-MIA poster in the window, so we weren’t hopeful, and he didn’t really want to talk.  Wasn’t rude, but did not want to tell us anything about his political views (part of the task here is to mark down whether the person is leaning toward Obama or McCain, and what political issues matter most to them).

The next guy was a sleepy-faced 22 year old, maybe, with no shirt on.  He was friendly, especially when he saw Celie and Iris — he mentioned that he was a twin too.  He told us that he was probably leaning toward Obama because his sense was that Obama is “probably more for the working man.”  He is a construction worker and a member of the union; he sort of apologized for his appearance and mentioned that he had a shoulder injury and had slept in late because of the medication. He did not seem to know much about the election; when I said something about Biden, I wasn’t sure if he knew who I meant.  I mentioned a factoid about McCain planning to give the top 1% wealthiest members of the population an over $100,000 tax cut, and that seemed to make an impression.  Overall, talking to this guy felt useful if only to associate some friendly local faces with the Obama campaign (Celie and Iris probably helped).  Also, we left him with two voter registration forms which he seemed happy to have.

There was one other encounter like that – a nice mom type whose very friendly 3-year-old daughter was eager to invite Celie and Iris in to play in her bedroom.  I missed this conversation, but S. says that the woman explained that her husband is McCain all the way, much of her own family are Obama supporters, and she’s kind of wavering or in between.  We were excited to hear that she said she was turned off by the bitterness and rancor of the RNC.  Sarah’s strategy was to stress what Obama will do for the middle class and on economic issues and to point people towards the campaign website.  She commented that it suddenly felt very useful to self-identify as a Middle-Class Mom (probably better than an oil painter and hugelkultur practitioner, for this purpose).

We found it kind of surprising to witness how many people are truly undecided.  We talked with a friendly man who explained that he and his wife generally wait until the last week or so to decide.  I wasn’t sure if this indicated a basically personality-based approach to the decision — deciding which candidate they feel most personally comfortable about — or whether it was more a sign of a set of political beliefs that is truly squarely in the center, whatever that means.  Sarah was struck by how determining family seemed to be; many of the people we spoke to immediately made reference to what their husband or wife or siblings thought, and that really seemed to be the most important single factor.

A lot of people were not home and I can’t imagine this little stint was hugely meaningful, but it felt good to have put a bit of sweat equity into the campaign (dragging that wagon is hard work!)

I’d urge everyone to consider doing some canvassing.  Remember, there are people in your neighborhoods (or nearby) who may barely know who the candidates are, or know little beyond what their spouse told them, and people who will not bother registering if someone doesn’t physically hand them a form.  Just call the Obama campaign and say you can do some Neighbor-to-Neighbor canvassing.

http://my.barackobama.com/n2n

McCain/Palin vs. Bears

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The Republicans are now officially the Stephen Colbert party as they rally around a tough anti-bear platform.

“We’re not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana,” McCain continued. “I don’t know if that was a paternity issue or a criminal issue, but …”

As Gail Collins points out,

This is an old line… But even if it was the biggest waste of $3 million in history — even if it was money to sedate grizzlies so hairdressers could apply attractive red tints to their fur — do we want a candidate for president of the United States obsessing about it?

It’s now evident that McCain chose Palin as his Soul Mate in part due to her equally fierce anti-bear policies.  As Palin wrote in a January 2008 Op-Ed in the NY Times (weird! didn’t remember that one),

This month, the secretary of the interior is expected to rule on whether polar bears should be listed under the Endangered Species Act. I strongly believe that adding them to the list is the wrong move at this time…..The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, has argued that global warming and the reduction of polar ice severely threatens the bears’ habitat and their existence. In fact, there is insufficient evidence that polar bears are in danger of becoming extinct within the foreseeable future.

Palin’s position reminds me of the administration torture policy, where failure to become fully extinct in the foreseeable future is analogous to failure to die, and anything below that standard falls short of torture or environmental crisis.  Anyway, presumably these positions were inspired by Stephen Colbert’s well-known “arctophobia, the fear of bears,” which he describes as “giant, marauding, godless killing machines.”

Maybe this all has some encoded relationship to the Russia-Georgia conflict and a symbolic revival of Cold War politics?

Drool in the Pool

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Took Celie and Iris to the long-awaited Drool in the Pool.  After the local pool closes for the Fall, they have a night (two nights this year) where dogs are allowed to swim.  It’s kind of a nutty scene with large retrievers and labs heaving themselves into the diving pool with an enormous splash to fetch tennis balls.  I treasure the memory from last year’s event of this little fat pug doing a determined dog-paddle around the perimeter of the pool while wearing a life vest with a handle on top.  As dogs five times his size leapt heedlessly over him, he had this expression of concentration on his face, like “just doing my laps, folks, don’t splash please!”   When it looked like he was starting to get tired, his owner reached in and scooped him out.

The girls spent about 20 minutes throwing a purple plastic bone for a sweet dog named Zoe.  It all went great until Celie accidentally clocked another little girl in the ear with the bone.  I sort of saw that coming — they were heaving the bone without a whole lot of scrupulous aiming.

That’s odd, someone posted a video from last year’s DITP with a soundtrack of Queen’s “Fat-Bottomed Girls.”  huh?

I hate to say it, but the whole Drool in the Pool concept makes me reflect that a normal day at the pool is basically Pee in the Pool, considering the number of babies and toddlers splashing around.  Remember, “the use of swim diapers and swim pants may give many parents a false sense of security.”

Introducing Pot Luck

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So, we somehow ended up naming the kitty Pot Roast.  No, wait, that’s not it… Pork Chop?  Oh, that’s right — it’s Pot Luck.  I think it’s kind of cute, actually.   We can call him Lucky for short.

He is still soldiering along.  He’s gotten a lot better at drinking from the bottle, and bigger (we think).  He lives in the bathtub now on his heating pad.

OK, back to the obsessive reading of political blogs (Palin’s actual speech is in half an hour).  Pot Luck should be the nominee — he’s authentic, he’s an ordinary kitty, other kitties can really relate to what he’s gone through.  He has executive experience managing a medium-sized bathtub.

New kitty!

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Here’s the new kitty (the one Sarah brought home in the middle of Obama’s speech)!

Sarah was visiting her friend Julie; Julie’s daughter Haley had brought this little guy home the day before — I think a teacher at Haley’s school had found an abandoned litter.  We have not yet formally committed to keeping him permanently and as far as Celie and Iris understand, it’s a foster care situation.  Julie and Haley were calling him “Dito” which I don’t think we’re going to retain.  The girls seems to want to call him something like Blackie, but we’re trying to steer them gently away from that.  (Oy, just thought about the Obama speech context — OK, any “Blackie”-type name is definitely off limits.  Maybe Hope or Change?)

So far he’s mostly all about trying to learn how to drink from the little bottle, at which he scrabbles fiercely.  He’s just beginning to learn how to crawl a bit.  Right now he’s kind of pouncing on and attacking a tiny stuffed bear, which is a big breakthrough.

I’m concerned that he’ll turn out to have some sort of feral-kitty trauma, but we’ll see, and he’s pretty cute.

Barney Smith

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I surged with Hoosier pride watching Barney Smith’s little speech.  Here’s a short piece about Barney, a former lifelong Republican who was fired from a t.v. tube factory in Marion, Indiana (to the Northeast of Indianapolis).

He was awesome! And such a Hoosier, totally authentic.  His wife worked at a high school cafeteria; cafeterias are a major part of Indiana culture, e.g. the cult favorite Gray’s Cafeteria on the way towards Bloomington from the airport (long lines of retirees, great fried chicken, totally sweet waitresses who call you honey).

Those “real people” speeches were a stroke of brilliant stagecraft.  Also especially loved the woman from North Carolina who’s voted for every Republican since Nixon but can’t take any more.  Part of the subliminal political “framing” here was clearly to get some chubby white people (Applebee’s riblets consumers, to cite my own recent post on Indiana obesity) up there as counterweight to the beautiful slim, fit leanness of the Obamas, which was starting to become a liability.

I will be very disillusioned if it turns out they came from central casting in L.A.  No doubt Republican operatives are delving into their personal histories as we speak and some nude photos will turn up in someone’s past (not Barney’s, though, I pray).

Obama’s speech

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That was really satisfying.  Every night this week I DVR’d the PBS coverage of the convention and started watching at 8:45 or 9 — that way by 10 or so I’d be nearly caught up after fast-forwarding through all the various functionaries.  Obama’s speech really felt like a culminating payoff to the week (although it was distracting when Sarah showed up in the middle of it with a mewling newborn kitten — more on that later).

I liked Andrew Sullivan’s comment today, which accords with my brother Jake’s theory (expressed to me a week ago) that Obama and his people were engaging in a crafty “rope-a-dope” strategy — letting McCain attack, hanging back and not really responding, waiting it out, and then finally striking back at the right moment.

It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety. It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism – in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.

What he didn’t do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again … and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

He took every assault on him and turned them around. He showed not just that he understood the experience of many middle class Americans, but that he understood how the Republicans have succeeded in smearing him. And he didn’t shrink from the personal charges; he rebutted them. Whoever else this was, it was not Adlai Stevenson. It was not Jimmy Carter. And it was less afraid and less calculating than Bill Clinton.

Above all, he took on national security – face on, full-throttle, enraged, as we should all be, at how disastrously American power has been handled these past eight years. He owned this issue in a way that no Democrat has owned it since Kennedy. That’s a transformative event. To my mind, it is vital that both parties get to own the war on Jihadist terror and that we escape this awful Rove-Morris trap that poisons the discourse into narrow and petty partisan abuse of patriotism. Obama did this tonight. We are in his debt.

Look: I’m biased at this point. I’m one of those people, deeply distressed at what has happened to America, deeply ashamed of my own misjudgments, who has shifted out of my ideological comfort zone because this man seems different to me, and this moment in history seems different to me. I’m not sure we have many more chances to get off the addiction to foreign oil, to prevent a calamitous terrorist attack, to restore constitutional balance in the hurricane of a terror war.

I’ve said it before – months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away.

Know hope.

One observation (obviously not an original one): in the focus on Obama’s “lofty rhetoric” and oratorical powers, it sometimes seems forgotten that for a President, words and language are the primary and almost the only tool at hand.  The President isn’t going to wade into a bar fight, fire a gun, lift heavy weights, run a marathon, or anything like that.  He (or she) is going to use language is various forms, in speeches, policy meetings, bills, diplomacy, and so on.  Even the President’s “actions” are for the most part going to be verbal.  So it’s not as if it’s a minor or trivial part of the job to be a powerful and effective speaker and crafter of words.

This week sent me back to the way I felt a while ago, that it seems crazy and impossible that McCain could stand a chance this year, although that is probably naive.  It does seem like a sign, though, that a hurricane threatening New Orleans may arrive simultaneously with the Republican convention.